John Oliver

There’s only one comedian who can make millions of Americans want to watch an 18-minute segment about chicken farming, but in barely a year on the air, John Oliver’s Sunday night show, “Last Week Tonight,” has carved a niche making the driest policy subjects go down easy.

And Oliver—the heir to Jon Stewart now that “The Daily Show” has ended its run—gets results. After millions of YouTube viewers watched his 13-minute rant about the Federal Communications Commission, which had proposed a new set of rules that would allow Internet and media companies to pay for faster connectivity, Oliver exhorted viewers, “Turn on caps lock and fly, my pretties!” The agency soon received millions of comments and hundreds of thousands of emails about the proposed rule—enough to break its website. By February, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler had reversed course, issuing a new rule preserving “net neutrality.” Oliver had made net neutrality—“the only two words that promise more boredom in the English language are ‘featuring Sting,’” he said—into a viral cause that President Obama, too, endorsed.

John Oliver Gets Political

“The death penalty is like the McRib. When you can’t have it, it’s so tantalizing. But when they bring it back, you think, ‘This is ethically wrong.’”

“Jail can do for your actual life what being in a marching band can do for your social life. Even if you’re just in for a little while, it can destroy you.”

“It took the country that cares the least about football to bring down the people who have been ruining it [FIFA]. That’s like finding out that Kesha arrested a group of bankers involved in commodities fraud.”

“Inequality is a bit like cinnamon. You definitely want to have a little of it to spice life up a bit, but too much of it can be very dangerous.”

It’s not just the FCC that Oliver has used humor to skewer. Blending comedy with investigative journalism, the British-American took on FIFA amid allegations of corruption and poor labor practices, a full year before the Justice Department indicted some of the soccer association’s top officials; civil forfeiture (“I know it sounds like a Gwyneth Paltrow euphemism for divorce, but incredibly it’s actually even worse than that,” Oliver quipped); and drone strikes. There was even a takedown of the “Miss America” pageant, in which Oliver wielded piles of tax documents (and some bikini B-roll) to prove the organization gives out far less in scholarship money than it claims. Often, Oliver builds on others’ reporting, but he refashions it in a way that makes complex and, yes, boring news easy and fun to understand—in other words, policy perfectly packaged for the YouTube age.